We Wear The Mask

Yes, I know I stole the title from Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Last week, I  gave the briefest of brief introductions to six ancient Greek schools of philosophy and their answers to the question, "What is the Good Life?" 

In one of my classes, as we wrapped up discussion, one student boldly proclaimed:

"I don't think life has any purpose. It doesn't mean anything. Why are we looking at this question? In fact, even if there were some higher being who appeared and told me my life had a purpose, I wouldn't care. I don't want to know."

He wasn't being facetious. Quite the contrary, he's an avid student and earnest. I was taken aback. I've had students in the middle of an epistemological crisis before ("But how do we know anything at all, let alone our purpose!?"). I've had students argue that they alone can forge their purpose in life--that's a fairly popular view. But I've never had a student actively object to the very concept of life having meaning. 

I just finished reading his homework, in which he argues that humans are only an accumulated set of masks for different settings, a compilation of roles we play. In his view, underneath the masks lies only silence and a void. 

Never in my career have I felt so keenly that teaching matters as I have in the last two or three years. I don't think he's alone in seeing life this way, he's just considerably more articulate than many of his peers. I certainly don't begrudge him the freedom to think and believe as he chooses, but this seems a particularly bleak outlook and somehow representative of his TikTok generation. They work so hard to cultivate the right masks that they become the masks they wear.

How do we as educators reach beneath this surface to show how life and relation to other people can be so rich and full and even free of masks? I wonder whether many of my students have any experience of real intimacy with another human being, even in close friendship. Surely the Humanities are a gateway into considering meaningful living...?

Little does he know that I'm about to introduce him (and all the others!) to Viktor Frankl, Simone Weil, and Michel Foucault.  I've been gleefully planning my next lesson.

Learning to Box

I just devoured Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, by David Epstein. He ranges quite far and wide but the central theme of constraints acting as a conduit for creativity and for deep thought comes through powerfully. Four key takeaways for educators:

1. Frame problems precisely, rather than proposing solutions to students. The constraint of the problem forces creative and critical thinking. He was writing about professional settings, but I found myself rethinking some of the comments I leave on student writing. I need to ask more questions like, "How could you connect this point in Paragraph 3 with the point you're making in Paragraph 5 more explicitly?" or, "Right now, it seems like Source A contradicts Source B. I wonder, is there a way to resolve this tension?"

2. Inspire creativity by establishing clear boundaries. Creative thought actually requires specific constraints. He uses the example of Bach's compositions as wonderfully creative and complex, in part, because he added his own false constraints to the many rules about composition that already constrained him, producing paths for creation. "As a prominent creativity study put it, given complete freedom, our very strong urge is to follow the 'path of least resistance.' Specifically, we do only what we have done before or follow the first example that jumps to mind. Our brains enjoy convenience, and that takes less cognitive effort....In other words, when anything is possible, it becomes nearly impossible to do anything new. Complete freedom, paradoxically, leads to conformity." (p.58) Epstein goes on to lay out "preclude" constraints which forbid familiar paths and "promote" constraints which push people to consider specific new paths.

3. Offer students opportunities to practice sustained and deep focus. We are always actively training working memory and focus, in one direction or another. And we are doing a particularly terrible job of it, at the moment! He shares the work of Gloria Mark on focus over the last twenty years. When she first began her work, she "found that the typical office worker switched tasks every three minutes, on average....By 2012, office workers were switching tasks every seventy-five seconds. By 2022, it had stabilized at about every forty-five seconds." (p.154) Here's the real kicker: our brains grow so accustomed to this constant interruption of focus that, when we are not interrupted, we interrupt ourselves at the same intervals! He shares the contrasting story of Isabel Allende's writing technique of setting aside a space: "I go there, and there is a state of mind that is: I'm here to do this and nothing else and no one can interrupt."(p.152) Where do we give these opportunities to students? And to teaching faculty, for that matter? 

4. Direct student attention. In a world full of endless new information, attention is a limited resource. according to Herbert Simon, "The design principle that attention is scarce and must be preserved is very different from a principle of 'the more information the better.'"(p.164)